What amazes me most is that NOBODY in these clips flinches, says anything, or even seems to react one way or the other. I mean realistically, two things could have been happening (a) a fucking nuclear explosion or (b) a crazy fucking meteorite, but either way, it didn't at first appear to be just another shooting star. GOT TO LOVE RUSSIANS. Americans would have been freaking the fuc out crying and getting hysterical!!

Haha, and the Russian pop music playing on the car radios is a PRICELESS soundtrack!

SuchFriendsAreDangerous

02.15.2013 04:23 PM

MOSCOW — With a blinding flash and a booming shock wave, a meteor blazed across the sky over Russia's Ural Mountains region Friday and exploded with the force of an atomic bomb, injuring more than 1,000 people as it blasted out windows and spread panic in a city of 1 million.
While NASA estimated the meteor was only about the size of a bus and weighed about 7,000 tons, the fireball it produced was dramatic. Video shot by startled residents of the city of Chelyabinsk showed its streaming contrails arcing toward the horizon just after sunrise, looking like something from a world-ending science-fiction movie.
It came hours before a 150-foot asteroid passed within about 17,000 miles (28,000 kilometers) of Earth. The European Space Agency said its experts had determined there was no connection between the asteroid and the Russian meteor – just cosmic coincidence.
The meteor over Russia entered the Earth's atmosphere about 9:20 a.m. local time (10:20 p.m. EST Thursday) at a hypersonic speed of at least 33,000 mph (54,000 kph) and shattered into pieces about 30-50 kilometers (18-32 miles) high, the Russian Academy of Sciences said. NASA estimated its speed at about 40,000 mph and the energy released in the hundreds of kilotons.
"There was panic. People had no idea what was happening," said Sergey Hametov of Chelyabinsk, about 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) east of Moscow.
"We saw a big burst of light, then went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud, thundering sound," he told The Associated Press by telephone.
The shock wave blew in an estimated 100,000 square meters (more than 1 million square feet) of glass, according to city officials, who said 3,000 buildings in Chelyabinsk were damaged. At a zinc factory, part of the roof collapsed.
The Interior Ministry said about 1,100 people sought medical care after the shock wave and 48 were hospitalized. Most of the injuries were caused by flying glass, officials said.
Emergency Situations Ministry spokesman Vladimir Purgin said many of the injured were cut as they flocked to windows to see what caused the intense flash of light, which momentarily was brighter than the sun.
There was no immediate word on any deaths or anyone struck by space fragments.
President Vladimir Putin summoned the nation's emergencies minister and ordered immediate repairs. "We need to think how to help the people and do it immediately," he said.
Some meteorite fragments fell in a reservoir outside the town of Chebarkul, the regional Interior Ministry office said. The crash left an eight-meter (26-foot) crater in the ice.
Lessons had just started at Chelyabinsk schools when the meteor exploded, and officials said 258 children were among those injured. Amateur video showed a teacher speaking to her class as a powerful shock wave hit the room.
Yekaterina Melikhova, a high school student whose nose was bloody and whose upper lip was covered with a bandage, said she was in her geography class when a bright light flashed outside.
"After the flash, nothing happened for about three minutes. Then we rushed outdoors. ... The door was made of glass, a shock wave made it hit us," she said.
Russian television ran video of athletes at a city sports arena who were showered by shards of glass from huge windows. Some of them were still bleeding.
Other videos showed a long shard of glass slamming into the floor close to a factory worker and massive doors blown away by the shock wave.
Meteors typically cause sizeable sonic booms when they enter the atmosphere because they are traveling so much faster than the speed of sound. Injuries on the scale reported Friday, however, are extraordinarily rare.
"I went to see what that flash in the sky was about," recalled resident Marat Lobkovsky. "And then the window glass shattered, bouncing back on me. My beard was cut open, but not deep. They patched me up. It's OK now."
Another resident, Valya Kazakov, said some elderly women in his neighborhood started crying out that the world was ending.
The many broken windows exposed residents to the bitter cold as temperatures in the city were expected to plummet to minus 20 Celsius (minus 4 Fahrenheit) overnight. The regional governor put out a call for any workers who knew how to repair windows.
Russian-language hashtags for the meteorite quickly shot up into Twitter's top trends.
"Jeez, I just woke up because my bed started shaking! The whole house is moving!" tweeted Alisa Malkova.
Social media was flooded with video from the many dashboard cameras that Russians mount in their cars, in case of pressure from corrupt traffic police or a dispute after an accident.
The dramatic event prompted an array of reactions from prominent Russians.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, speaking at an economic forum in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, said the meteor could be a symbol for the forum, showing that "not only the economy is vulnerable, but the whole planet."
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a nationalist leader noted for his vehement statements, blamed the Americans.
"It's not meteors falling. It's the test of a new weapon by the Americans," the RIA Novosti news agency quoted him as saying.
Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the incident showed the need for leading world powers to develop a system to intercept objects falling from space.
"At the moment, neither we nor the Americans have such technologies" to shoot down meteors or asteroids, he said, according to the Interfax news agency.
Meteroids are small pieces of space debris – usually parts of comets or asteroids – that are on a collision course with the Earth. They become meteors when they enter the Earth's atmosphere. Most meteors burn up in the atmosphere, but if they survive the frictional heating and strike the surface of the Earth they are called meteorites.
NASA said the Russian fireball was the largest reported since 1908, when a meteor hit Tunguska, Siberia, and flattened an estimated 80 million trees. Chelyabinsk is about 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles) west of Tunguska. The Tunguska blast, attributed to a comet or asteroid fragment, is generally estimated to have been about 10 megatons.
Scientists believe that a far larger meteorite strike on what today is Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula may have been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago. According to that theory, the impact would have thrown up vast amounts of dust that blanketed the sky for decades and altered the climate on Earth.
The 150-foot space rock that safely hurtled past Earth on Friday was dubbed Asteroid 2012 DA14.
The asteroid was invisible to astronomers in the United States at the time of its closest approach on the opposite of the world. But in Australia, astronomers used binoculars and telescopes to watch the point of light speed across the clear night sky.
Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science, called the back-to-back celestial events an amazing display.
"This is indeed very rare and it is historic," he said on NASA TV. "These fireballs happen about once a day or so, but we just don't see them because many of them fall over the ocean or in remote areas. "
Experts said the Russian meteor could have produced much more serious problems in the area hosting nuclear and chemical weapons disposal facilities.
Vladimir Chuprov of Greenpeace Russia said the Russian government has underestimated potential risks of the region. He noted that the meteor struck only 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Mayak nuclear storage and disposal facility, which holds dozens of tons of weapons-grade plutonium.
A chemical weapons disposal facility at Shchuchye also contains some 6,000 tons (5,460 metric tons) of nerve agents, including sarin and VX, about 14 percent of the chemical weapons that Russia is committed to destroy.
The panic and confusion that followed the meteor quickly gave way to typical Russian black humor and entrepreneurial instincts. Several people smashed in the windows of their houses in the hopes of receiving compensation, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
Others quickly took to the Internet and put what they said were meteorite fragments up for sale.
One of the most popular jokes was that the meteorite was supposed to fall on Dec. 21, 2012 – when many believed the Mayan calendar predicted the end of the world – but was delivered late by Russia's notoriously inefficient postal service.

floatingslowly

02.15.2013 04:49 PM

Glass is.....some sort of street-slang, and not what you believe it to be made of....correct? :o

SuchFriendsAreDangerous

02.15.2013 05:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by floatingslowly

Glass is.....some sort of street-slang, and not what you believe it to be made of....correct? :o

Yeah, I tried to fix the title after I more carefully read up on the meteorite, I initially read a poorly translated Russian article which mixed me up thinking it was a Tektite kind of thing ;)

floatingslowly

02.15.2013 05:19 PM

This event was likely from a Fe-Ni chondrite.

Tektite is formed at the impact site from terrestrial materials that have been fused into glass, and are found in strewnfields. I have a nice piece from a fall in china, if you'd like to see a picture. It would take one hell of an airburst to make tektite.

My most favorite piece in my collection is a slice from a pallasite fall in Minsk, during the 1880's. Pallasite is extremely rare with only 61 known falls to date.

SuchFriendsAreDangerous

02.15.2013 05:26 PM

Yes thank you for the disdainful science lesson, I was aware of how tektites are formed, you can keep your geology collection for show and tell or the fucking science fair next week, maybe they'll give you some sopes to go with that Vonnegut taco you won recently ;)

demonrail666

02.15.2013 05:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by floatingslowly

This event was likely from a Fe-Ni chondrite.

Tektite is formed at the impact site from terrestrial materials that have been fused into glass, and are found in strewnfields. I have a nice piece from a fall in china, if you'd like to see a picture. It would take one hell of an airburst to make tektite.

My most favorite piece in my collection is a slice from a pallasite fall in Minsk, during the 1880's. Pallasite is extremely rare with only 61 known falls to date.

No disdain. Your statement that you were "mixed up thinking it was a tektite kind of thing", along with the thread title, led me to believe you somehow felt tektites were extraterrestrial...

Surely, you can see MY confusion. I'll never attempt to correct you again, Your Smartiness. ;)

SuchFriendsAreDangerous

02.15.2013 05:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by floatingslowly

No disdain. Your statement that you were "mixed up thinking it was a tektite kind of thing", along with the thread title, led me to believe you somehow felt tektites were extraterrestrial...

Surely, you can see MY confusion. I'll never attempt to correct you again, Your Smartiness. ;)

I don't mind be corrected, its when people do it egoistically to inflate themselves that I say to them, "Eat a fat dick."

You and Robert have an agenda where y'all think I am stupid to science simply because I am a religious person, in that sir, you are wrong. Do I take this forum seriously enough to always write in the kind of nomenclature that reflects some kind of term paper? No. I don't really give a shit that much to appease the haters.

floatingslowly

02.15.2013 05:55 PM

I have no fucking idea what you're talking about. Rob doesn't know shit about SCIENCE!

As far as what I believe: I believe yr being paranoic.

floatingslowly

02.15.2013 05:57 PM

Srsly wtf lol.

floatingslowly

02.15.2013 06:41 PM

Ah, well, you can't fuck with Schunk. He knows his shit.

Me? I just like talking about rocks and could rightly give a fuck about re-educating anyone.

As far as your comment about a "term paper" - thanks! You know I type this shit with my thumbs, right?

I refuse to address your cries of percieved religious persecution as I HAVE NEVER.

floatingslowly

02.15.2013 06:44 PM

This forum has simmered to an atychiphobic broth that has become far too salty for my taste.

Have a nice day (life) / peace out / 5,000-g.

Trama

02.15.2013 09:38 PM

FUCK OFF with the science lessons, professor.

pfft, HOW DARE YOU?

EAT A FAT DICK

NO, I don't want to see your fucking show and tell rocks.

lo-fi suicide

02.16.2013 01:20 AM

I live in Cheliabinsk and must say I had no time to fear when explosion happened.
But you are right, we don't fucking care :)

SuchFriendsAreDangerous

02.16.2013 02:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lo-fi suicide

I live in Cheliabinsk and must say I had no time to fear when explosion happened.

This is why I love SYG yo, talk about six degrees of separation!

Quote:

But you are right, we don't fucking care :)

Hahaha, it very much seemed that way. I can appreciate pragmatism, but then again, I am Orthodox, its a shrug your shoulders kind of religion.

OK only sometimes ;)

h8kurdt

02.16.2013 04:43 AM

So is that another forum member gone? People need to stop being so hostile to each other! Yes I understand the hypocrisy in me saying that considering my distaste for gast.

Let's all chill.

_slavo_

02.16.2013 04:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SuchFriendsAreDangerous

What amazes me most is that NOBODY in these clips flinches, says anything, or even seems to react one way or the other.

that's because these videos are recorded on traffic cameras attached in the inside of the cars. people in Russia started mounting them into their cars to have evidence for insurance companies in case of accidents, car crashes etc.

SuchFriendsAreDangerous

02.16.2013 01:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by _slavo_

that's because these videos are recorded on traffic cameras attached in the inside of the cars. people in Russia started mounting them into their cars to have evidence for insurance companies in case of accidents, car crashes etc.

Then how can we hear the radios? And why is everybody still just driving around like normal? In one shot, the guy clearly has the meteorite fly almost directly over head and yet never even pauses or misses a beat in making a left turn and pulling into a parking lot, as if nothing had ever happened. Me? I probably would have stopped the car.